Civilization and Its Discontents is a book by Sigmund Freud. Written in 1929, and first published in German in 1930 as Das Unbehagen in der Kultur ("The Uneasiness in Culture"), it is one of Freud's most important and widely read works.[1]

Contents

In this seminal book, Sigmund Freud enumerates the fundamental tensions between civilization and the individual. The primary friction stems from the individual's quest for instinctual freedom and civilization's contrary demand for conformity and instinctual repression. Many of humankind's primitive instincts (for example, the desire to kill and the insatiable craving for sexual gratification) are clearly harmful to the well-being of a human community. As a result, civilization creates laws that prohibit killing, rape, and adultery, and it implements severe punishments if such commandments are broken. This process, argues Freud, is an inherent quality of civilization that instills perpetual feelings of discontent in its citizens.

Freud's theory is based on the notion that humans have certain characteristic instincts that are immutable. Most notable are the desires for sex, and the predisposition to violent aggression towards authoritative figures and towards sexual competitors, which both obstruct the gratification of a person's instincts. Human beings are governed by the pleasure principle, and the pleasure principle is satisfied by the instincts.

Freud begins this work by taking up a possible source of religious feeling that his previous book, The Future of an Illusion, overlooked: the oceanic feeling of wholeness, limitlessness, and eternity.[2] Freud himself cannot experience this feeling of dissolution, but notes that there do indeed exist different pathological and healthy states (e.g. love) where the boundary between ego and object is lost, blurred, or distorted. Freud categorizes the oceanic feeling as being a regression into an earlier state of consciousness before the ego had differentiated itself from the world of objects. Freud sticks to his earlier conviction that the need that the religious feeling arises out of is 'the infant's helplessness and the longing for the father' [3], and “imagine[s] that the oceanic feeling became connected with religion later on”, that is, that it is not a genuine religious experience, though certainly people experiencing it have felt that way.

The second chapter delves into how religion is one of many modes of being that arise out of the need for the individual to distance and soothe itself in the face of the suffering that exists within the world. The ego of the child forms over the oceanic feeling when it grasps that there are negative aspects of reality that it wishes to separate itself from. But at the same time as the ego is hoping to avoid displeasure, it is also building itself so that it may be better able to act towards securing happiness, and these are the twin aims of the pleasure principle when the ego realizes that ‘reality’ must also be dealt with. Freud claims that the 'purpose of life is simply the programme of the pleasure principle'[4] and the rest of the chapter is an exploration of various styles of human adaptation used to secure happiness from the world while also trying to avoid or limit suffering. Freud points out three main sources of displeasure we attempt to master: our own painful and mortal existence, the cruel and destructive aspects of the natural world, and the suffering endemic to the reality that we must live with other human beings in a society. Freud regards this last source as “perhaps more painful to us than any other” [5], and the remainder of this book will extrapolate on the conflict between individual instinctual gratification-seeking and the reality of societal life.

The third section of the book addresses a fundamental paradox of civilization: it is a tool we have created to protect ourselves from unhappiness, and yet it is our largest source of unhappiness. People become neurotic because they cannot tolerate the frustration which society imposes in the service of its cultural ideals. Freud points out that the contemporary technological advances of science have been, at best, a mixed blessing for human happiness. He asks what society is for if not to satisfy the pleasure principle, but concedes that civilization has to make compromises of happiness in order to fulfill its primary goal of bringing people into peaceful relationship with each other, which it does by making them subject to a higher, communal authority. Civilization is built out of wish-fulfillments of the human ideals of control, beauty, hygiene, order, and especially for the exercise of humanity's highest intellectual functions. Freud draws a key analogy between the development of civilization and the libidinal development of the individual, which allows Freud to speak of civilization in his own terms: there is anal eroticism that develops into a need for order and cleanliness, a sublimation of instincts into useful actions, alongside a more repressive renunciation of instinct. This final point Freud sees as the most important character of civilization, and if it’s not compensated for, then “one can be certain that serious disorders will ensue." [6]. Thus civilization creates discontent and mental pathology within its members through repression of instinct.

In the fourth chapter Freud attempts a conjecture as to the developmental history of civilization, which he supposed coincided with man learning to stand upright. This stage is followed by Freud’s hypothesis from Totem and Taboo that human culture is bound up in an ancient Oedipal drama of brothers banding together to kill their father, and then creating a culture of rules to mediate ambivalent instinctual desires. Gradually love of a single sexual object becomes diffused and distributed towards all of one’s culture and humanity in the form of a diluted ‘aim-inhibited affection’. Freud discounts the idea that this passive and non-judgemental affection for all is the pinnacle of human love and purpose. Freud notes that while love is essential for bringing people together in a civilization, at the same time society creates laws, restrictions, and taboos to try and suppress this same instinct, and Freud wonders if there may not be more than sexual desire within the term ‘libido’.

“Psycho-analytic work has shown us that it is precisely these frustrations of sexual life which people known as neurotics cannot tolerate” [7]. So Freud begins the fifth section of this work, which explores the reasons why love cannot be the answer, and concludes that there exists a genuine and irreducible aggressive drive within all human beings. And while the love instinct (eros) can be commandeered by society to bind its members together, the aggressive instinct runs counter to this tendency and must be either repressed or directed against a rival culture. Thus Freud acknowledges that there is irrevocable ill-will within the hearts of man, and that civilization primarily exists to curb and restrain these impulses.

In the sixth chapter, Freud reviews the development of his concept of libido to explain why it must now be separated into two distinct instincts: the object-instinct of eros and the ego-instinct of thanatos. This ‘new’ concept of the death drive actually has a long developmental history in Freud’s writings, including his investigations into narcissism and sadomasochism. Freud admits that it may be difficult to accept his view of human nature as being predisposed towards death and destruction, but he reasons that the suppression of this instinct is the true cause behind civilization’s need for restrictions. Life and civilization, then, are born and develop out of an eternal struggle between these two interpersonal forces of love and hate.

Freud begins the seventh chapter by clearly explaining how the repression of the death instinct works to instill neurosis in individuals: the natural aggressiveness of the human child is suppressed by society (and its local representative, the father-figure) and turned inward, introjected, directed back against the ego. These aggressive energies develop into the super-ego as conscience, which punishes the ego both for transgressions committed (remorse) but also sins it has only fantasized about (guilt). All individuals must submit themselves to forming these feelings of guilt, for their aggressive instincts must be repressed if they hope to share in the love civilized society has appropriated for its members. Guilt and neurotic repression of instinct are simply the price we pay in order to live together in families and communities.

The guilty conscience is the price paid by the individual to belong to civilized society, but often this guilt is left unconscious and is experienced as anxiety or ‘discontent’. Freud also considers that in addition to the individual super-ego, that there may also be a ‘cultural super-ego’ in existence that sets itself up as a conscience for society, and that his recommendation for it is the same as his recommendation for many of his neurotic patients: that it must lower its demands on the frail ego. Freud concludes this book by expanding on his distinction between eros and thanatos: “When an instinctual trend undergoes repression, its libidinal elements are turned into symptoms, and its aggressive components into a sense of guilt” [8], and he ponders on how the eternal battle between these heavenly powers will play out in mankind.

This work should be also understood in context of contemporary events: World War I undoubtedly influenced Freud and had an impact on his central observation about the tension between the individual and civilization. Amidst a nation still recovering from a brutally violent war, Freud developed thoughts published two years earlier in The Future of an Illusion (1927), wherein he criticized organized religion as a collective neurosis. Freud, an avowed atheist, argued that religion has tamed asocial instincts and created a sense of community around a shared set of beliefs, thus helping a civilization. Yet at the same time organized religion also exacts an enormous psychological cost to the individual by making him perpetually subordinate to the primal father figure embodied by God.

"...admittedly an unusual state, but not one that can be stigmatized as pathological ... At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that 'I' and 'you' are one, and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact."

"Civilization, therefore, obtains mastery over the individual's dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city."(84)

"One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be 'happy' is not included in the plan of 'Creation'."

"Happiness, in the reduced sense in which we recognize it as possible, is a problem of the economics of the individual's libido."

"The question of the purpose of human life has been raised countless times; it has never received a satisfactory answer and perhaps does not admit of one."

"...readiness for a universal love of mankind and the world represents the highest standpoint which man can reach. Even at this early stage of the discussion I should like to bring forward my two main objections to this view. A love that does not discriminate seems to me to forfeit a part of its own value, by doing an injustice to its object; and secondly, not all men are worthy of love."

"Man has become, so to speak, a God with artificial limbs." (29)

"Human life in common is only made possible when a majority comes together which is stronger than any separate individual and which remains united against all separate individuals. The power of this community is then set up as 'right' in opposition to the power of the individual, which is condemned as brute force."

"The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction. It may be that in this respect precisely the present time deserves a special interest. Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety. And now it is to be expected that the other of the two 'Heavenly Powers', eternal Eros, will make an effort to assert himself in the struggle with his equally immortal adversary. But who can foresee with what success and with what result?"(111)